End users and businesses are demanding more from the telecommunication industry. While end users request personalized services, better performance, better user experience, businesses need to get more information about their consumers, easier and more secure access to devices and greater flexibility for provisioning new services. There is a key role to play for equipment providers, service providers and IT players together to make this a reality by providing converged IT and network infrastructure.
The continuing growth of mobile traffic is well documented, driven mainly by consumer smart phones, streaming video, messaging and P2P applications. The growth in mobile traffic is set to increase dramatically as enterprises extend their business processes to smart mobile devices and as machine-to-machine solutions mature throughout vertical industries. Wireless sensors are key enablers to many mission-critical scenarios, from smarter traffic to video analytics. Wireless sensors are expected to grow in their numbers exponentially over the next 10 years. The cellular network is the ubiquitous platform for integrating these devices with vertical back office solutions.
The worlds of IT and telecommunications networking are converging bringing with them new possibilities and capabilities that can be deployed into the network. A key transformation has been the ability to run IT based servers at network edge, applying the concepts of cloud computing (Mobile-Edge Computing or MEC). Mobile-Edge Computing can be seen as a cloud server running at the edge of a mobile network and performing specific tasks that could not be achieved with traditional network infrastructure. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) gateway and control functions and content caching are two examples, but there are many others.
However, many traffic flows need low latency. All real-time media require a certain level of latency, particularly at the edge of the network. Introducing any new network element to perform edge processing also typically introduces new latency.